cahn | Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 30

In which, despite the title, I would like to be told about the English Revolution, which is yet another casualty of my extremely poor history education :P :)

Also, this is probably the place to say that RMSE opened with three Fritz-fics, all of which I think are readable with minimum canon knowledge:

The Boy Who Lived - if you knew about the doomed escape-from-Prussia-that-didn't happen and tragic death of Fritz's boyfriend Hans Hermann von Katte, you may not have known about Peter Keith, the third young man who conspired to escape Prussia -- and the only one who actually did. This is his story. I think readable without canon knowledge except what I just said here.

Challenge Yourself to Relax - My gift, I posted about this before! Corporate AU with my problematic fave, Fritz' brother Heinrich, who's still Fritz's l'autre moi-meme even in corporate AU. Readable without canon knowledge if one has familiarity with the corporate world and the dysfunctions thereof.

The Rise and Fall of the RendezvousWithFame Exchange - Fandom AU with BNF fanfic writer Voltaire, exchange mod Fritz, and the inevitable meltdown. (I wrote this one and am quite proud of the terrible physics-adjacent pun contained within.) Readable without canon knowledge if one has familiarity with fandom and the dysfunctions thereof :P

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

selenak

as she talking about Fredersdorf?? She was probably talking at least partially about Fredersdorf and Voltaire's description of same, wasn't she. (I don't think of him as one of a series of "special young men," so it didn't even occur to me when writing the comment.)

Yes, I think that's at least partly based on Voltaire's description of Fredersdorf both in the pamphlet and the memoirs. Because Fredersdorf is the only one to whom "court offices" would really apply. Unless we're counting the likes of Algarotti and being made Chamberlain, as Voltaire himself was. The occasional handsome hussar like Georgii or the suicidal Degen long after Fredersdorf's death didn't get a court office. Maybe Glasow counts in that he saw himself as Fredersdorf's successor, but as we've seen, he only was as valet - as Treasurer, someone else got the job. And he certainly didn't inherit being head of spy business or Secret Councillor. Burgdorf, he of "Fritz was totally gay, nothing but gay, never touched a woman in his life and was platonic life long pen pals with Orzelska" insistence, calls Fredersdorf "the Prussian Pompadour", and doesn't Blanning reference him, Mildred? (Not having read Blanning myself, I don't know.)

Jewelled snuff boxes, btw, were a standard Fritz gift for people he liked, but not just handsome young men. His siblings got their share, too.

Not a complaint, just an observation: the selected Goethe quotes about FS' coronation miss out that the text in totem is Goethe looking back on the HRE already crumbling big time back then, with such ceremonies as FS' coronation a charming anachronism, and he follows this up by describing the coronation he himself witnessed as a boy, that of Joseph (which I quoted you from - remember, old moth-eaten clothing, too large, Joseph very unhappy?).

Was MT really the first to think of taxing nobles and the Church?

No, but within Austria the first in a good long while. Within the HRE, things differed from state to state, but remember, tax privileges were usually the first thing an Emperor handed out to nobility in order to get their support in the Middle Ages, and once given, these privileges remained. Also there wasn't just one church.

Kaunitz was pretty cool and full of excentricities and capability in the books I've read earlier, too. Fritz was usually fuming about him, but then, he would be.

Was MT more anti-Semitic than, idk, the average person on the street?

Hard to say, since the avarage person on the street didn't have the power to tax Jews or make them leave. Note Goldstone qualifies her own assessment a bit in a footnote and a comparison to England. I think what you could argue made MT's antisemitism more noticable at this particular point in time is that it was old school religiously connotated. We aren't yet in the 19th century where antisemitism becomes new school racism connotated and converting to Christianity makes no difference to the antisemites, but the 18th century is a transition time. Remember, we talked about what Moses Mendelssohn had to go through in Frederician Prussia, which was a progressive state for its time but still had appalling laws for Jews. One big reason why Heinrich Heine was such a Napoleon fanboy was that the Code Napoleon for the first time gave the Jews equal citizen status in all the German states where France de facto ruled, and that was more than half a century later.

Anyway, Goldstone pointing out the antisemitism and the chastity commission is a reasonable attempt to show her subject's darker sides, though how far or how little the chastity commission was related to FS' infidelities is entirely speculative. MT's contemporaries drew the connection at once, nost least because Fritz openly wisecracked about it, but it is speculation and Goldstone gets in the novelistic vein again when talking about it as fact.

Mind you, I do think she's on to something when talking about how all the pregnancies and the weight gain must have left their traces in MT; the connection between the physical and the emotional/psychological is something older biographiers often overlook. Otoh, re "the fat one" - she joked about this herself, signing a letter to her favourite lady-in-waiting with "Therese la Grosse" (and it wasn't a depressed letter). Now maybe she was covering up her resentment and pre-empting the joke by making it herself; but it could also be she at the point of the letter (when she's in her mid 50s), she doesn't mind anymore.

Speaking of the footnotes, I see FS' business sense and accomplishments is banished to one as well. If you read the main texts of these chapters, you have the impression he never did anything but hunting and wenching.

I'm with you in finding the whole "she made it it up to FS about the Lorraine by letting him be Emperor" thing annoying. Especially since she literally couldn't have been Empress without him being Emperor due to the Salic law. She was Empress-Consort. (Also why Joseph had to be crowned and had to co-reign with her after his father's death.) Making FS Emperor was in her own self interest. Now there was actually an ongoing discussion in MT's family whether or not Joseph should be made King of the Romans and thus candidate for Emperor, or whether they should just let this go (and stick to Austria, Hungary, Bohemia and the other Habsburg-inherited countries) but not least because Karl Albrecht the Wittelsbach guy had demonstrated even a weak Emperor from another family could still contribute to a very real threat of those other countries, the decision was that the Habsburg(-Lorraine) family needed to keep the Imperial title, too.

Jesuit education: well, it's complicated. The Jesuits started out with a stellar reputation as scholars, and they would regain it after the reformation of the order once it became legal again, plus of course the standards were different from country to country. But it's certainly true that the Austrian Jesuits in the late 17th and in the 18th century were refusing to deal with any of the new thoughts and developments, with the result that their education really was hopelessly outdated and old fashioned. (In other German states, it depended on the state. Leopold Mozart in Augsburg was the first of his family to attend a grammar school, loved it, hugely benefited from it being a Jesuit school complete with school plays in which he acted and played music, and retained a life long affection from it.) Of course, the Jesuits weren't the only order to be culprits there. One reason why Joseph's reforms would take the education entirely out of the hand of the church.

re: Pompadour, I'm with you, though I like Goldstone's description of all the many things she had to be at that court in addition to being Louis' lover (jester, councillor, art patron, "part snake-charmer", etc.), all so Louis would never get bored. Being and remaining Maitresse-en-titre was a gruelling job which had very little to do with how good or bad you were at sex.

Washington: I wouldn't now, you two are way better versed in the ways of US founding fathers.

More later, off to breakfast.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Burgdorf, he of "Fritz was totally gay, nothing but gay, never touched a woman in his life and was platonic life long pen pals with Orzelska" insistence, calls Fredersdorf "the Prussian Pompadour", and doesn't Blanning reference him, Mildred? (Not having read Blanning myself, I don't know.)

Blanning does reference Burgdorf, if that's what you mean. He also talks about Fredersdorf at great length, including this line that I've always enjoyed: "Frederick's numerous letters to Fredersdorf are intimate in tone and substance--what one might expect from a doting husband."

Washington: I wouldn't now, you two are way better versed in the ways of US founding fathers.

You'd think, but if it wasn't covered in school, I don't know it, because I never studied the American Revolution outside of school. And I gather from you two not knowing it that it's not in Hamilton. ;)

From:

cahn

Yeah, and at least when I was in school we covered the early New World explorers and the early colonies like Jamestown, and then I feel like we basically skipped straight to the Revolutionary War. I'd heard of the French and Indian War but I know zero about it.

Hamilton was too young to be involved in the French and Indian War :) (when this alleged incident occurred.)

From:

cahn

Jewelled snuff boxes, btw, were a standard Fritz gift for people he liked, but not just handsome young men. His siblings got their share, too.

And porcelain snuffboxes! (Which I'm not likely to forget, after watching Mildred figure out how to structure the reveal of her fic around that porcelain snuffbox ;) )

Mind you, I do think she's on to something when talking about how all the pregnancies and the weight gain must have left their traces in MT; the connection between the physical and the emotional/psychological is something older biographiers often overlook.

Yeah, that's a good point!

Speaking of the footnotes, I see FS' business sense and accomplishments is banished to one as well. If you read the main texts of these chapters, you have the impression he never did anything but hunting and wenching.

UGH, yes, I forgot to mention that! I had a VERY different view of FS from what you've told me than the one that I'd get just from reading the main text here.

re: Pompadour, I'm with you, though I like Goldstone's description of all the many things she had to be at that court in addition to being Louis' lover (jester, councillor, art patron, "part snake-charmer", etc.), all so Louis would never get bored. Being and remaining Maitresse-en-titre was a gruelling job which had very little to do with how good or bad you were at sex.

Ha, yes, I did like that part :D

From:

mildred_of_midgard

And porcelain snuffboxes! (Which I'm not likely to forget, after watching Mildred figure out how to structure the reveal of her fic around that porcelain snuffbox ;) )

Well! So while I know that Fritz was big into giving out snuffboxes, and he was Mister Porcelain, so at some point he surely gave out porcelain snuffboxes, I don't know that for sure. Chekov's porcelain snuffbox happened because I was looking at 18C snuffboxes on Google images for inspiration, and when I saw that they made snuffboxes out of porcelain, I had to use it, because Fritz had *just* occupied Meissen and helped himself to everything he could get his hands on.

So that was actually creative license that's probably historically accurate, not a fact I know to be true! (But I will not be surprised if

felis promptly pops in to tell me about some letter or document that mentions a porcelain snuffbox. ;))